Graphene has interesting electronic properties, such as the high mobility and the symmetric dispersion relation for electrons and holes. It also has a zero energy bandgap, and therefore cannot be directly used as channel material of field-effect transistors. Indeed, the zero gap does not represent an effective barrier to electron and hole transport, and it is therefore not possible to fully switch the transistor off. [Lemme, M.; Echtermeyer, T.; Baus, M.; Kurz, H. A graphene field-effect device. IEEE Electr. Dev. Lett. 2007, 28, 282-284.] [Avouris, P.; Chen, Z.; Perebeinos, V. Carbon-based electronics. Nat. Nanotech. 2007, 2, 605-615.]
Recent experiments have shown the possibility of fabricating two-dimensional hybrid heterostructures consisting of intercalated carbon and h-BCN (hexagonal boron-carbon-nitrogen) domains, whose electronic and mechanical properties can be tuned by varying the relative fractions of the three elements. Graphene has a zero energy bandgap, but h-BCN domains can have a gap between 1 and 5 eV, as shown in [Ci, L.; Song, L.; Jin, C.; Jariwala, D.; Wu, D.; Li, Y.; Srivastava, A.; Wang, Z. F.; Storr, K.; L. Balicas, P. M. A., F. Liu, Nat. Mater. 2001, 9, 430.]
On the basis of these results, we describe the invention of a new family of transistors with fully two-dimensional channel based on hybridized graphene engineering. This approach can open new routes for graphene nanoelectronics, since hybrid h-BCN-graphene structures can allow to suppress the ambipolar behavior, blocking the flow of one type of carriers, and to fully modulate current due to carriers of the other type.